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I have just finished reading Muletrain to Maggody by Joan Hess (Find this book in our catalog).

This is the 2004 entry in the colorful, humorous, larger-than-life, irreverent, and marginally politically correct series about feisty Police Chief Arly Hanks in the sleepy Arkansas town of Maggody. I have always liked Chief Hanks and her attempts to stay sane in a town of misfits, some of whom are benign, some of whom are vicious and many of whom are inbred. In this story she has to battle cannily with the local county sheriff in order to get his help with a suspicious death that occurred among a group of Civil War reenactors, who have descended on the town to make a documentary movie about a lost muletrain of Confederate Gold. A bizarre cast of characters take over the isolated town and add their own tortured motives to the already confusing mix of red herrings Arly has to pursue in identifying the killer. The locals add to Arly's problems - everyone seems to think he or she is entitled to the Confederate gold, could they just find its hiding place in the local system of caves. Everyone is hiding something. Two senior citizens just disappear on Cotter's Ridge, and the local home-ec teacher goes missing too.

I have liked all the books in this series. Despite at first seeming to be a case of the Dukes of Hazard meets Murder She Wrote, this story, like the others, is a carefully crafted and satisfying classic closed-community mystery. All the diverse plot lines neatly come together in the end. The clues are there for the alert reader to see. This caricature of Arkansas country life may seem very broadly drawn, yet Joan Hess cunningly skewers greed, infidelity, and hypocrisy in her characters. Their vanity and self-absorption lead to outcomes ranging from burlesque to tragedy. Evil stalks the quiet community and another, this time harmless, soul falls victim to violence before all is sorted out. Arly does always manage to sort things out, and things get back to what passes for normality; but under the comedy there lingers a sense of seriousness and sadness.

Labels: Arkansas fiction, Arly Hanks, cozy mysteries, humorous fiction, Joan Hess, Maggody